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Page 1, Page 2 Content That's why I suggested "upon completion". Kick the PUG before completion, don't get the credit. And of course the amount of Urnedsub made for entering the queue can be scaled back the more premades you bring in. Enter alone, get 2 Urnedsubs, 2/5, get 1, 3/5, half an Urnedsub, 4/5, quarter of an Urnedsub. The more people you're helping rather than just doing your own thing with your buds, the faster it goes. And then you've put in your time and can do whatever you want with your buds. That's the role you enter the queue with, since apparently the queue matches according to roles for a mix of DPS/tank/heal. If you can't perform that role, the likliehood is that the quest won't complete. If it doesn't complete, you won't earn the Urnedsub. Excellent point! How about if the mentor goes AFK, the clock tracking mentoring stops. If the mentor is nowhere near the person being mentored, the clock stops. Would that fix your concern? No, they're not rewarded for simultaneously being 1) so much better than the opposition that the opposition is simply crushed, and 2) unwilling to restrain themselves from crushing the opposition. You still get urnedsub for winning. You still get urnedsub for being really good. You only lose it if you're vastly superior to the opposition AND willing to step on them over and over and over for giggles, well past the point at which it's clear that you've won. As for support roles, they're currently defined by queues, but I can see that this might not work as well for PvP as it does for PvE--perhaps it should be defined in PvP by how much healing or damage taken you actually accumulate? Someone who heals will have done a lot of healing at the end, someone doing a lot of tanking will have absorbed a lot of damage per death at the end. Does that address the concern better? Seems like it does to me, but I'm happy to reconsider. I agree that this is a concern, and perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my initial description. Easy to craft things shouldn't generate Urnedsub at the same rate as harder to craft things. Bottom tier consumables are things you should have to craft in VERY high quantities, Archivos-level gear would earn several Urnedsub per piece. But either way, you don't get Urnedsub credit for stuff that you're using for yourself, and you don't get Urnedsub credit for things that you just hand out--people have to use it. Recharge timers on medishots and other consumables should prevent spam crafting those, particularly if a lot of them have to be used to earn Urnedsub. Better? Or still problematic? If you're actually at the keyboard, you can remove the AFK status by one click of the mouse button. RP sessions routinely have people enter AFK and then leave again quickly just to shake off the status, so this doesn't alienate RPers unless they are so inattentive that they don't notice every line they type into /say has the tag. The decline thing can happen on accident, but if it happens repeatedly in a small time window that's no accident. It's really there more to deter people from exploiting these behaviors constantly, not to hit people hard for doing something once or twice in a day. That's why the cost is modest if it only happens rarely and increases rapidly the more it happens. Would it be better to have a counter so that there's no penalty until some number of infractions is reached, but a higher penalty upon reaching an infraction? Not punishing for playing better. Punishing for being such a poor winner that you jump up and down on the beaten repeatedly just for kicks. I agree with you that Carbine can and should prevent spawn camping. But in the absence of that control, the way to deter it is for it to cost players Urnedsub when they do it, no? Because they're not creating any value. They're simply taking something that someone obtained through work, jacking up the price, reselling it, and sucking up the profit. That's profiting off of creating inflation. It benefits the players who do it to the detriment of everyone who doesn't do it. Do those suggestions address your concerns? | |} ---- If Carbine could take the twenty bucks people hand to them and simply give them an amount of plat that fluctuates with the overall plat supply in the economy without ever acting through a CREDD token, do you believe people would spend less cash buying plat than they do now? If the answer is "no", then the current model is in fact exactly the type of system that you claim to be against. | |} ---- ---- You're right, that is a terrible idea. Especially the stuff in orange, which I presume you don't mean seriously and are just trying to use to pretend that somehow none of us can recognize actions that benefit the game and actions that detract from it. We can. Even you, despite your sarcasm. Giving Urnedsub credit to people who get a lot of views on their streams wouldn't be a terrible idea, though, if there were a sensible way for the game to track it. Generating hype and interest for the game is a benefit to the game, no? | |} ---- That is NOT HOW CREDD WORKS. How are we supposed to take your suggestions seriously when you don't understand the system? I'm out this thread. I'm not going to continue to discuss this with someone who has no idea how CREDD actually works. | |} ---- ---- FYI - CREDD expire after a few months, IIRC. You best use 'em. Secondly, we've already explained this -- that isn't how CREDD works. CREDD ONLY comes from real money, and through tthe process of one person buying CREDD and selling it to someone for money, that's revenue. If I have to explain this again I'm going to vomit. | |} ---- I read the OP, believe me. I understand exactly what you're trying to implement, you're trying to implement a system whereby doing things you think are valuable in a broader community approach are awarded with free gametime, you want Carbine to become a direct registered goldseller using their power to generate currency, and you want to keep people who have simply ground currency the most efficient and simple way available to them from buying their game time that way. I know you don't like Evade, but just because he said he has a ton of CREDD doesn't mean you need to punish all the CREDD users who don't want to support the Group Finder queues. There is a point you don't understand about how CREDD works. At the present moment, Carbine's making a lot more money than that. The CREDD sold isn't regulated directly as a justifiable inflation percentage. If Carbine adds no more than 5% money inflated per month, that means that money is 5% harder to remove (remember that money isn't removed from the game until it is spent at a vendor, money doesn't disappear in vast quantities into the AH or CX, where the real money is made). 5% is also an extremely conservative number if Carbine wants to maintain current sales (since CREDD sales still form a fairly significant portion of their income). One player could feasibly buy almost all the extra money and wreck havoc all over the AH, currently he can't because he can buy all the CREDD he wants, but he can't actually sell it on the exchange all he wants at the price he wants. The CREDD users regulate the rate of money gained because they have to directly earn it, it isn't a controlled economy system that tries to regulate inflation. A CREDD costs, and is bought for, whatever the two parties agree upon. Since the people running a few hours of solid gathering grinding (the target of your proposal) to make money can only make money at a certain rate, the price of CREDD can't rise above and the number of CREDD sold can't exceed the amount of money generated. In that system, both buyer and user of CREDD are already regulating to generate the platinum used in relation to the economy. Carbine as an entity has extraordinary abilities as a seller of platinum and a granter of free time, Carbine is also forced to limit those in that capacity as you've envisioned them by making sure that people eventually can't, at any price, buy platinum it generates (though Carbine is in no need of actually spending time generating it, they are immune to scarcity of supply). Also, they will have to limit the time given out, meaning that eventually you can do all the things you want people to do and earn nothing. Believe me that there are a lot more people who'd like to play for free in this scenario when it literally costs them nothing, so where the CREDD system balances who wants to play for free with how much of their money they actually want to spend on the CREDD, skipping that step means that there's no tradeoff. Who wouldn't just run dungeons until they get their free month? The only way to stop it from hemorraging money is to also limit who gets a free month, which can't easily be done. Right now, it's limited to people who want to buy a CREDD at the current price. Your proposal would change it to, "Anyone who's got the time to earn it." It isn't self regulating unless you mean to deny the ability later, which isn't going to go over well when supplies "run out". There's a reason these types of things don't work in the real world. CREDD functions on a very basic concept, how much it costs to buy from Carbine, how much the buyer feels it is worth on the exchange, and how much the user feels it is worth on the exchange. Carbine simply charges a flat fee by the CREDD, they are uninvolved in any manipulation or regulation of where that CREDD goes afterwards or who uses it, allowing the price to float and supply to self-manage. That's something your proposal doesn't take into account, that if a larger number of people want a free month, they buy more CREDD, the price rises as the supply disappears at lower prices, and eventually people can't afford it. If someone wants to flood the market with CREDD, they have to get the price down to the range of the buyers to buy all of their stock, reducing the effectiveness by the CREDD of how much money it makes. Eventually, it runs out of buyers and simply sits. It is a completely self-maintained, self-regulated system that Carbine doesn't even need to step in on, they made their money the second the buyer bought the CREDD. That's why the idea of separating the plat from the CREDD and turning it into two different systems is far less effective. Instead of a self-regulating system, you've made two directly regulated systems. This is something you could outright avoid by just making the things you want people to do more profitable in sheer currency terms than the things you don't want them to do. You could say, "Those who queue in a queue that really needs people will make more gold than those who stand on their plot and farm mats to sell to a vendor," and simply avoid that. If you want to socially engineer people, you've suggested a pretty alarming and unpopular system with a very benign alternative. Just reward people for doing what you want to do with currency bonuses and reduce the amount you can vendor mats for. Not everyone would like that system, but it accomplishes the same goals, doesn't lock "good" players into only "buying" a "CREDD" (they aren't forced to have just the free month, they can spend their rewards for being a good player on a mount), people still have to grind up plat at a game-normal pace, and the CREDD system still self-regulates. It's got none of the drawbacks and more potential benefits. | |} ---- Unless there's some fine print somewhere, unclaimed Credd only expire on inactive accounts. | |} ---- Ah, well then my "IIRC" should be "IANRC." If that makes sense. | |} ---- I agree that it is possible to lose money if the system isn't tuned properly. The current system also fails if it's too easy to earn plat because then nobody spends cash on CREDD and CREDD supply evaporates, or if it's too hard to earn plat because then nobody can provide enough plat for the cash spenders to view it as worthwhile. The goal would be to tune the effort required to game it so that the number of people participating are about the same, but the activities being participated IN are beneficial to the larger game community rather than just the person farming the plat and the person buying it. But on the other hand, imagine the payout if people here stopped spending the time they used to earn CREDD on plat farming and spent that same amount of time actually being helpful. Imagine that people coming to this game stop showing up and asking "where is everyone?" and instead go tell their friends that they went into the game and not only does it have a cool setting and combat system, but there's people helping them through the queues, offering to mentor them, the AH/CX isn't wildly inflated. That word of mouth would make a big difference in affecting the existing prevailing views about this game. So it would have to be tuned and adjusted, just like the drop rates and sinks are tuned and adjusted. But still seems worth having the discussion about whether it could be done at all, no? | |} ---- I wouldn't say that in theory that's a bad idea, I just think you attacked it from the wrong angle. It seems like the problem is how much easier it is spinning circles on a gathering binge and vendoring the mats compared to running a dungeon. I'm totally behind that idea, there's not any particular reason a player should have the option of just gathering and running a full, coordinated 5 man dungeon run and choose the former because they'd make more money. Given how beneficial the latter is to the game and how much more work it takes, the rewards should be scaled accordingly. Just change the currency balance. Let running dungeons, especially in needed rolls, or whatever behavior you want to enforce be the most reliable way to grind up CREDD money. Or just any money. I might take a spin at the Group Finder if it was the best way to make plat in the game. At the very least, I'd run a lot more content days so we could make money. I wouldn't even buy CREDD with it, I'd just be happy to not have to play the AH and shoot for the stars to afford my runes. Not like content runners don't need money for runes more than anyone else regardless. | |} ---- ---- Hypocritical statement of the century. Other than how hard that particular statement made me laugh, I almost like this system, though I feel it's maybe too generous. I thought about suggesting they add CREDD to the EG vendor when Glory hits, but that wouldn't force the type of player interaction you intend to spark with this. The problem I see here is what I'm seeing right now with the CX and AH being down... people would much rather just not log in than have to talk to others to complete their personal goals. We still have goods, we still have money, we still have Trade chat, but most players are just saying, "screw it." EDIT No, I didn't take the time to read all 5 pages of this post. Sorry if I'm being redundant here. | |} ---- Actually, Carbine is guaranteed to lose money without a constant influx of subscribers or plat buyers. For example, If every plat-only player switches to Ursub farming, then you aren't getting any revenue, but you are getting game benefit (assuming they don't game the system). Say every plat buyer continues to buy at the same rate, again no influx in revenue. Thus, the revenue from new players you convert to subscribers, from the game benefit of Ursub farmers, must outweigh the loss of revenue from current subscribers who switch to Ursub farming, or get a free month occasionally from ursub naturally. The alternative to more subs is more people buying plat from Carbine, which can cause a whole host of issues. What happens if that recruitment influx never really materializes, at least not financially (e.g. can't make up the difference)? Do you then reduce/disable Ursub gains until everyone is back on subs? If you do that, you lose all those Ursub farmers, who used to be financially supported by others. This means the population shrinks, which means the game ends up in a worse state than it started, although it could be arguably more profitable short term (since no operating costs for those farmers) . That is the rub, right now every player, outside of trials, is worth at least $10.99/month (yearlong sub), and more likely they are in the $15 range. You are basically gambling on a system to try to produce constant subscriber growth, which is not a trend supported by the majority of recent MMORPGs or by Wildstar itself. Further, you have the issue of constant monitoring/adjusting. Both the Ursub and Plat buying systems will have to be constantly adjusted, which means more work. CREDD currently self-regulates based on simple supply and demand and Carbine would only lose money, in future credd purchases, if the entire system collapsed, which we have no evidence of that being an immediate danger. The Ursub system would need to be regulated by Carbine, and failure to do so directly hurts the bottom line. It is honestly far too much risk, compared to Vic's suggestions of tuning rewards for the tasks you want players to engage in. | |} ---- ---- Carbine is already a goldseller in this game, chum. I hate to break the news to you. That ship sailed when PvP imploded under their watch to a tidal wave of boosters and wintraders. The word "direct" here does not matter all that much in comparison to the word "goldseller". Link to a quote where Carbine reveals what fraction of their income is from CREDD sales? I'd love to see that statement. I can't seem to find it. As for the rest, which is sort of a loving ode to the free market that Bnol also joins in on, I hate to be the bearer of more bad news. Things don't work that way here or in That Other Game that uses a CREDD-like system. These games can control the plat supply with the quality of drops and changes over time to the loot tables. They can change the pricing and availability of plat sinks. Those are all forms of central regulation that impact the CREDD market. And even those haven't been enough in That Other Game, where they have had to directly intervene and pump their CREDD-like currency to prevent the economy from exploding multiple times in the last few years. The effect that banning multiboxing had on their economy was pretty striking, I thought. Wow, have people been gaming the hell out of the in-game currency for subscriptions there. The free market is a relatively robust system. It is completely self-regulating only in the same sense that natural selection is: only if you're willing to accept that mass extinction is a viable form of self-regulation. Since nobody is in fact willing to let their economy collapse entirely, it still needs to be managed to prevent catastrophic collapse--either by constant tweaks or automated failsafes. As for what prevents everyone in the game from just farming Urnedsub, that would be the same thing that prevents everyone in the game from sucking up all available CREDD until the price skyrockets to something that would require an entire month to achieve: the price of a sub is only 15 bucks. At some point, the number of hours you'd have to spend farming plat just to avoid spending two hours of minimum wage salary doesn't justify paying for your sub with plat unless you are REALLY hard up for cash. OK, there's a point made in both of these posts that's worth discussing because there's an aspect of it that's a fair criticism and an aspect that isn't. I'd like to take on the unfair one first: both of you are presuming that current cash subscribers are going to be earning Urnedsub from "normal play". Carbine doesn't need people to keep playing the way they're already playing, it needs people to step into roles that are currently underfilled. If people running tanks and healers in the group finder were common, people wouldn't be sitting in the queues as DPS until they give up. If people were mentoring down to sub-50 levels to help new players, threads asking "where is everyone?" wouldn't be frequent occurrences here. If people made alts in substantial enough numbers for levelling PvP arenas to be viable, those PvP arenas would actually happen. I can point to just those three issues as barriers to new people coming in. I'm sure Carbine has more. Once there's enough people doing these things that there's no real need for tanks or healers any more, and the queues are running regularly, the queues start to length for that playstyle and the rate at which Urnedsub accrues by doing it slows down. But if you aren't actively trying to farm Urnedsub but just doing your own thing, the rate at which you accrue it should be low. If it's not, then it's not tuned properly--either in terms of the amount of Urnedsub that you get for that activity, or in terms of the conditions that allow you to earn Urnedsub. That brings me to the fair point, which is that the rate at which you accrue Urnedsub may be really low, but it's not zero. So doesn't that mean that in the long term, normal subscribers just build up enough Urnedsub that they get a free month every once in a while? Wouldn't that be a loss? Yeah. It would be. Fair point. One way to address that is to say that Urnedsub isn't stable--convert it into CREDD within three months or it switches to Renown. That way if you're not actually trying to accumulate Urnedsub but just picking it up along the way, This simply isn't true. Nobody who has made the switch from paying with cash to paying with plat generates any revenue at all for Carbine. (Sorry to make you puke, Vince. It's still true whether you puke or not.) Revenue comes from three sources. Box sales, cash subs, and cash for plat. If you're not spending currently spending cash in one of those three ways, you're not part of Carbine's revenue stream. | |} ---- ---- ---- Oh, not to worry, they're certainly unlikely to change anything about the business model any time soon, unless they've been quietly planning it for a while and are planning to spring it on us as a surprise. :lol: What you call "insisting" I call "considering" and maybe even "suggesting", although "suggesting" seems a little strong given that I made it pretty clear that the idea was in a pretty rough form. Also, I'm pretty sure that I said I was looking for feedback and discussion and removed stuff from the list simply because you thought was a bad idea and thanked you for it. But even if we set those issues aside and pretend that I was in fact insisting on having my own way, the "or else" part would be "or else pay 50 cents a day to play a really awesome MMORPG and do whatever you want", which is hardly pulling out the chains and spikes. But hey, wouldn't be the first time that people have claimed that I must be declaring my undying hatred of all things not me. It seems to be a pretty common debate tactic around here. Thanks for your very considered opinion, though. | |} ---- ---- Give CunningLinguist 200 plat - gain 1000 Urnedsub. This would massively improve my enjoyment of the game. :D | |} ---- :lol: That may be getting just a tiny bit too specific, honestly. But I appreciate your enthusiasm. | |} ---- ---- If 50 cents a day is such a small issue then why are we even discussing this? You have tried to promote "hardcore" solo content and been a champion of those who want to "play their own game" and now come here and suggest that everyone who doesn't play "your game" is going to be punished? This entire idea is hypocritical in the extreme. I'm fine with rewarding people for doing things like you've listed but what you're asking for is that we punish those who don't by denying them the ability to subsidize their account via in-game currency. There's simply no getting around that fact. Pretty sure those words are yours and yours alone. | |} ---- ----